


You Are Iron, And You Are Strong

by demisms



Series: you never know how strong you are until strong is the only choice you have [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Miscarriage, Stepsiblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 07:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2499161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demisms/pseuds/demisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one with stepsiblings and rampant disappointments.</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <i>He's in America, in Alaska, to do some top secret retcon, he tells her over coffee another time. Mostly because he doesn't want to explain the concept of Jaegers and the Drift and Dr. Lightcap to a civilian, because highly educated scientists still look at them funny when they try to pitch it, and he's got no doctorate himself. Dominique seems to appropriately access the situation, senses Herc's discomfort, and politely asks if she can see his pictures of Chuck again.</i>
  </p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Iron, And You Are Strong

They meet in a kaiju-loss support group. 

It's church sponsored, and there are stale oreos and instant coffee on a table in the back of the room. Outside the stained glass windows, there's what once was a great skyline — now reduced to ash and rubble and enterprise, as anyone who owns a construction company is making money in the current economy. The meeting starts like any other; they go around in a circle and say their names, then they go around again and give a brief explanation of why they are there. Usually there's tears. 

The first time he sees her she's wearing a white cardigan and a floral skirt that goes past her knees. Her eyes are dry, but ringed with red and there are deep, dark rings beneath them. She stands when she speaks, shoulders back and head high when she announces that she has three children, two boys and one girl; her husband died in an airplane crash off the coast when the third kaiju to broach the ocean surface startled the pilots. They'd crashed spectacularly, and there had been no survivors. Richard had died, but he was going to leave her anyway, so she is not so upset about that. What keeps her awake at night is how her middle child cries at night, and her eldest keeps picking fights. Her youngest has stopped speaking, and they might be losing their family home, not that Anchorage was prime real estate anymore. Anything within 300 miles of the Pacific Coast wasn't prime real estate anymore, but sadly only so many could afford to move inland and to safety anymore. 

She's thinking about moving all of them, she says. To France. And after the meeting, he approaches her to discuss international airfare.

— 

He's in America, in Alaska, to do some top secret retcon, he tells her over coffee another time. Mostly because he doesn't want to explain the concept of Jaegers and the Drift and Dr. Lightcap to a civilian, because highly educated scientists still look at them funny when they try to pitch it, and he's got no doctorate himself. Dominique seems to appropriately access the situation, senses Herc's discomfort, and politely asks if she can see his pictures of Chuck again.

—

Chuck is, in a word, precocious. 

In a few words, a fucking terror.

—

The first time Raleigh, Yancy, and Jazmine meet Chuck Hansen, it's under the guise that their parents are just old friends. Yancy looks at his mother suspiciously, because why haven't they ever heard of her militant Australian friend, but Raleigh smiles and Jazmine hides behind him, and Chuck sniffs and acts like he's better than all of them. But everything goes over rather well.

—

The second time, when they are meeting after the disclosure of their parents affair, Chuck sucker punches Raleigh. Yancy gets his fist into Chuck's face three times in rapid succession. Then Chuck hits back, and Jazmine tries to get in the middle, and he accidentally punches her as well. And it's all over from there.

They have to be torn apart by their parents, screaming obscenities that the adults didn't even know they _knew_ at each other, and trying to rip each others hair out. 

—

"Are you going to marry Mr. Hansen, Mama?" Raleigh asks one night. His lip is still cut, but Herc says Chuck's shiner is fading. 

Dominique purses her lips, unsure how to express to her eleven year old how deep her loneliness runs, and how nice it is to share something so profound as _loss_ with another person. She's not sure if she loves Herc Hansen, nor if she can shoulder his emotional baggage along with her own, but she can't think of any good reason not to try. There are three good reasons to try right in front of her, sleeping in one big hotel room bed because they had to sell their childhood home and haven't found any sort of affordable housing yet.

"Do you want me to marry him?" she gives up, and asks him back with a teasing smile. It's obviously the wrong thing to say because Raleigh screws up his face and turns over to curl up against his brother. 

—

In a much nicer hotel room, ten year old Chuck Hansen slams the door to their room after telling his father that, _if you keeps fucking that woman, I'm gonna live with Uncle Scott!_

That threat doesn't do Chuck any good, because a few months and a lot of legal paperwork and governmental ass kissing later, Scott Hansen joins them in Anchorage to see the construction of the first Shatterdome. The Mark-1 Jaegers are a few months out. 

—

They get married before construction is complete, and by the time they move in Dominique has sorted and resorted and donated and recycled and thrown away enough of their worldly possessions that all she and her children own can be condensed into ten cardboard boxes and one duffle bag each. Chuck and Herc have been living this way for two years already, and between them they have just enough stuff to move into their triple quarters; one of the ones designed for families, that has a common area and three small bedrooms with beds cut into the wall. 

Raleigh and Yancy's boxes contain numerous photographs they'd taken when they'd been happy, a family, when they'd traveled the world. They paper the inside of their room with them. 

Chuck rooms with Jazmine, who still doesn't say much and who doesn't fight him on who gets the top bunk and who gets the lower one. He likes Jazmine. Her brothers can go choke on dicks, which he screams at them when one of them — Raleigh, Yancy, RaleighYancy, YancyRaleigh, they might as well be the same fucking person — smashes his face into the birthday cake his stepmother had made for him out of carefully rationed sugar and chocolate. 

—

Housing is a huge plus to their mother marrying a soldier. Housing, food, clothing, funds, safety. Assurance. 

When that soldier becomes one of the first men to pilot a Jaeger, notoriety comes along too. Jazmine's ten, Chuck is eleven, Raleigh is almost thirteen, and Yancy's seventeen, meaning he's the only one who can immediately enlist in the academy after Tacit Ronin, Romeo Blue and Coyote Tango take down a Category-1 along the coast of Mexico City. It's a source of contention between the Becket brothers, and a huge sore spot for Chuck who is jealous and angry and upset that his father didn't tell him more about the Jaeger project. It's the first thing Raleigh and Chuck bond over; their anger. And they compensate for not being allowed to take academy lessons by running all around the Shatterdomes they live in. While Yancy's up in Kodiak Island, the Becket-Hansen crew ships off to Australia, where Scott and Herc take up residence in the conn-pod of Lucky Seven and start fighting off kaiju and appearing in media spots all over the world. They're celebrities, whose children and step children get into and out of so much shit because of their status. It's ridiculous, but they must be learning _something_ , because there's more than one occasion where he overhears them telling Jazmine she's playing _wrong_ , that Cherno Alpha doesn't have _guns_ , she has Tesla Fists. 

—

Dominique loses their first baby. She hates herself for it, he can tell, but he tells her it's not her fault. Children shouldn't be born in a war zone, they can have more later.

But when she loses their second one, there's complications. His promise holds little weight in the face of a doctor telling them that, no, they'd never have children again, there is something wrong with her uterus, was Jazmine's birth difficult, there's something strange in her blood work up, and the doctor would like to take a closer look —

—

Raleigh joins Yancy at the Academy, and it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn't show the same natural skill as his brother. Yancy flew through every academic and physical test the instructors could throw at him, and the only reason he wasn't piloting at twenty-one was because he hadn't found the right partner yet. Initial tests show that he and his brother have a high chance of being Drift Compatible, but Raleigh still needs to finish the basic training and instruction that Yancy took before they can be strapped into a motion harness and sent off to fight intergalactic aliens crawling up from under their oceans. 

Yancy has to drag him out of the pool within the first month, panting and punching him until he vomits up a gallon of chlorinated water and then some of breakfast too. The oldest Becket then has to wipe water out of his eyes and glower at the instructor with her clipboard and disapproving glare, and tells her evenly that:

"If he goes, I go."

—

When Raleigh leaves for training, and Chuck is still stuck at home, he decides he hates them _both_ again. But when Jazmine puts a picture of the four of them up on the wall of his bedroom — _his_ now, as she's taken her brother's room now that they've gone — he doesn't take it down.

When Stacker Pentecost's adopted daughter says that she likes it and sounds sad while speaking, he says she can have it if she wants. Mako gives him such a stern look it could serve for an entire _lecture_ on the value of family.

—

Gipsy Danger is off the presses, and Raleigh and Yancy are getting fitted for their drive suits before Raleigh even officially graduates the Academy. They're Drift Compatible. That's all that matters.

Chuck is on Kodiak Island himself by the time they "graduate", but he's sullen, in the back of the crowd, and doesn't congratulate them in person. 

—

Dominique's cancer is caught late. She smokes all the more frequently once diagnosed, and despite Jazmine's tears and Herc's shouting, doesn't quit. Raleigh and Yancy cry too, and Chuck doesn't roll his eyes which is something of a personal achievement for him. They all wear black to her funeral, which is quick and official and very PPDC personnel standard. It's normal to the Hansens at this point, but all three Becket children look incredibly rattled and uncomfortable through the entire quick service.

Their mother's body is incinerated, and Herc takes Raleigh and Yancy aside for an attempt at a paternal talk (that he never managed to give to his own child). Later the two go out and get into a fight and get their first strike on their official Jaeger record. A few days later they take down their first kaiju off the coast of Las Angeles. 

Chuck, for his part, takes Jazmine out for a cupcake.

—

Chuck remembers over hearing his father talk to Raleigh on the phone, to wish him a happy birthday in December of 2019. They're busy men, they don't have a lot of time for visits and chit chat. Chuck is about to graduate the Academy, the final touches are being put on the first (and only) Mark-V Jaeger, and it's going to be his, his, _his._ Mako Mori is angry at him and it hurts more than it should have, but even he can muster up a very forced, "Happy Birthday" when prompted to over the phone. He can hear Raleigh beaming, delightedly tells them he'll _see you soon!_ The Becket boys are coming to Australia sometime in April.

Plans change, of course. Chuck expects to at least see him at Yancy's funeral, the ceremony with the American flag draped across the empty coffin because they could never find his body and the line of reporters forcibly restrained by the police. But Marshal Pentecost says that he's withdrawn from the corps; that he refused further medical treatment, brain scans, and survivor benefits. His current location is unknown. 

—

Jazmine starts acting out. In the end, Herc reaches out to the last living Becket he can find, Richard's brother Charles who lives in Canada, and who agrees to take his niece in. Their parting is laced with cruel, biting words from her that make even Chuck grimace with distaste. His drive suit has three stamps on the breast to signify how many kaiju he and his old man have taken down, he doesn't have time for the antics of a silly little step sister. 

Nor to react to finding the picture on his wall gone with all the things in her room.

They move them into different barracks, smaller ones. They keep their possessions to a minimum throughout their career, which helps when word comes in that it's time to pack up and vacate; Striker is being decommissioned, and is to be stripped down for parts for the Wall of Life, aka the biggest joke known to man kind at the moment. 

—

Mako Mori imagined him differently because a majority of what she's read painted him a cocky, ignorant, hyperactive tool. A majority of what she's heard from Chuck Hansen emphasized the _tool_ bit.

—

Five years and four months after Knifehead, Chuck Hansen and Raleigh Becket exchange blows in the hallway of the Hong Kong Shatterdome. It's not the first time they've fought in front of people, just these people specifically; in this Shatterdome specifically. It's not an important first.

—

"I thought he would have been dead by now."

"People got a job to do, they live a little longer to do it."

For a has-been deserter with a rebellious streak, he does his job well in the Tokyo Bay, and 50,000 feet above the city itself. But the nods they exchange only equal minimal respect, not forgiveness for invading each other's lives, sticking out like sore thumbs and serving as constant reminders of their dead parents' replacements.

—

Forgiveness comes later, when childhood seems incredibly distant and childhood spats seem stupid, especially in comparison to facing down Cat-5 kaiju and staring death in the face. Death comes with the name _thermonuclear bomb_ , in the pit of the Pacific Ocean. There's no fanfare or cheering, just the steady thrum of blood in his ears and the constant blaring of seven different alarms in Striker Eureka's conn-pod. There's there gurgling growl from the _ugly bitch,_ Slatten, outside as she and whatever evil counterpart Gipsy hadn't slain converged on them. 

"Hang on, Striker! We're coming for you —" Raleigh's voice keeps crackling over the radio, and something tight wells up in either his chest or Stackers, it's hard to tell who's getting the air pushed out of who's chest at the thought of family, no matter how distant, rushing to their side. 

"No, Raleigh, listen to me," Pentecost shouts, but Chuck's mouth is open too. He's not entirely sure what he was going to say, or if he would have said it if he'd figured it out. He lets his copilot do all the talking, watching Stacker's methodical plans flit across his subconscious as he spoke them aloud to Raleigh and Mako.

There's no fanfare or cheering. There's radio silence from LOCCENT, and Mako says something over the feed in Japanese, which he never understood and doesn't even have the time to go digging into the Marshals mind to figure it out exactly what she said. But he knows it's warm and bitter and sad; emotional, weighted, heavy. There's a reason he doesn't understand, it's not meant for him.

— 

Heroes deaths. Turns out that's a family trait.


End file.
